


Less Than Lethal

by ion_bond



Category: Daredevil (Comics)
Genre: Banter, Change your life!, Ethical Dilemmas, Gen, Marvel Universe, Mentor/Protégé, New York City, Police Procedural, Vigilantism, tasing or tasering?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-10-03
Updated: 2008-10-03
Packaged: 2018-03-24 19:29:41
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,960
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3781663
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ion_bond/pseuds/ion_bond
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Matt has been down. He has been dropped, pummeled and stabbed. He’s taken a bullet.</p><p>He has never been shot with a Taser before.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Less Than Lethal

**Author's Note:**

> This story takes place sometime after the events of vol. 2, issue 100 in the comic book. Thanks to girlwithoutfear for reading this over, and to Padraig, who coined the phrase “Kitchen cops” and got me started on this line of thinking.

Matt has been down. He has been dropped, pummeled and stabbed. He’s taken a bullet. 

He has never been shot with a Taser before. It hurts like a sonofabitch.

If he weren’t so tired, he could have dodged the twin leads, barbs attached to twenty-one feet of insulated wire that snapped out at him from the bulky plastic weapon in the officer’s hand. Matt has read that the Tasers the NYPD uses are special-order yellow instead of the standard black, easily distinguishable from real handguns. There used to be one per sector car. Now, every uniform sergeant has a Taser, the department buckling under pressure, this year, to shoot fewer minorities and mutants reaching for cell phones in the dark.

Matt knows a lot about this. He has all the numbers. He seems to remember doing the research for a case a while back, although right now -- fifty thousand volts traveling through his body, lighting up his radar like a long, bright flash in a thunderstorm -- he can’t remember why. Right now, he’s not even sure when he’s got court tomorrow.

He should have at least tried to dodge. He knew that the darts could penetrate up to two inches of clothing, but somehow, he didn’t think they could make it through the treated leather of his costume.

Fifty thousand volts is a lot, and yes, his muscles are tensing involuntarily, and yes, he has fallen to his knees on the pavement, but it isn’t as bad as it sounds. It’s only sixteen amps of current. It’s only five seconds, and what’s five seconds of pain?

The burst ends, and Matt can hear again. “Anything in your pockets that’s going to stick me?” the Latina cop asks, fifteen feet to his left. “Any needles, knives?” The runner Matt had been beating mutters a no, his belly up against the alley brick while she frisks him.

The cop with the Taser is fairly young to be a sergeant, and doesn’t smell like cigarettes. Matt guesses from the sound of his breathing that he has a WTC citation bar pinned to his uniform. Those lungs are familiar; so is his after shave. They know each other.

The partner, who is less familiar, is now efficiently rear-cuffing the kid. He has blood all over his face and tee-shirt. “All right,” she says, tugging on the connecting chain. “Let’s go.”

These police arrived too late to see the kid do anything illegal, but they are taking him in anyway. They are Kitchen cops, and this is the pull that Daredevil still has on this turf. Matt appreciates that. He’s earned a little professional courtesy.

Once upon a time, though, they would have talked to him. They would have asked Daredevil what was what, and then he could have explained to the cops about the runner’s buddy, the man with the stash. The would-be buyer caught a cab on Sixth Avenue ten minutes ago, but the other dealer is still nearby. Spooked by the sirens, he has disappeared into an all-night deli up the block, where he’s ordering a sandwich. Judging by his voice and the way he moves, Matt can come up with basic pedigree info, but that’s it. There is no name.

Once upon a time, Daredevil knew the name and heartbeat of every drug dealer in midtown.

5’7”, 220 pounds, white male in his thirties, wearing a messenger bag. Check the bag. Daredevil is still willing to tell the police all of this, if he gets a chance, but it looks like he’s going to have to cut and run between shocks.

His front teeth jar together. Stopping to think like this has already cost him another five-second burst. His radar flickers out with the renewed charge and he tastes metal that isn’t there and loses his sense of the ground beneath him.

They will bring the runner to the one-oh station house and voucher his cash, if he has anything more than the bills Matt heard him take. They will put him in an interrogation room, and if the kid is scared, if he talks enough for them to piece together a plausible story, one of the cops -- the sergeant Matt recognizes, maybe -- will go to Manhattan Criminal Court and depose that he saw the hand-to-hand himself.

It doesn’t matter. It won’t make trial without the drugs. And the man with the stash is paying for a lottery ticket and a sandwich, Boar’s Head turkey and swiss, hold the mayo.

Matt knows that when a police officer uses a Taser on a prisoner, procedure dictates that he or she be transported to the hospital to have the barbs removed by a doctor. You can’t take them out yourself, supposedly. He gets to his feet.

The sergeant doesn’t move, but the female cop sees what he’s up to and turns from the prisoner, extending her extendable baton as he rips the leads from his body. “Wait!” she says. “We gotta ask you --”

He jumps for the fire escape. She’s too late.

Once upon a time, Daredevil wouldn’t have still been kicking the shit out of a sixteen year old corner boy when the police got to the scene.

They’ve all fucked up tonight.

***

“I’ve never been tasered before,” Matt tells Angela Del Toro, an hour later on a rooftop in Carnegie Hill, leaning against the sloping skylight. “Or tased. Whatever.” He can feel the twin rips in his costume without removing his glove. The tiny exit wounds beneath his nipple sting.

“Me neither,” Del Toro admits. “I got pepper-sprayed though, this one time, on the job. Some drunk was trying to push me over the railing on a brownstone stoop, and my partner was not exactly Bullseye with that shit.”

Matt doesn’t know what she is doing here -- he thought she lived way up in the Bronx or something -- but it’s nice to be around someone who seems neither mad at him or sorry for him and therefore presumably doesn’t know what a mess his life is. “What was it like?” he asks.

“It hurt. I would definitely recommend avoiding it.”

“It’s not something that keeps me up at night,” Matt tells her. “My cowl is better than your cowl.”

“Yeah, well, I have to actually see out of mine.” Del Toro settles back on the flat of the roof.

He doesn’t hear any clothing rustle. “You in costume tonight?”

“I’m in my civvies. Jeez, Murdock, you suck. I do not get how you have pulled off this charade for so long.”

“I usually pick up more cues when my head isn’t pounding,” he says. She probably wouldn’t appreciate it if he told her that it was her sweat smell that threw him off. She must be wearing workout clothes. “So, no costume. What are you up to, then?”

“Checking out the view.”

“Sure,” says Matt. He’s so tired. He doesn’t even remember what there is to see on this side of Central Park, but he knows the feeling of wanting to get out, the city stretched before you like a dark jungle gym.

“Why d’you think they decided to tase you?” Del Toro asks. “Taser you? What is that verb?”

“You’re the ex-law enforcement professional. You tell me.”

She pats her empty hip. “I had a SIG-Sauer, not a Taser.”

“The sergeant had one of those, too.” Matt inserts two fingers into the space between his mask and his right temple and rubs for a second, then switches sides. “I don’t know. I broke up a drug sale. The customer ran off. It was just me and one of the dealers by the time anybody got there.”

“Was it that stuff -- you know that stuff ...?” She trails off.

Goddamn gossip mill, Matt thinks. Nothing is ever a secret.

“No,” he tells her. “Just crack.” He sighs, his whole skin aching. “I screwed it all up. I should have stopped the buyer first and I should have stashed the runner somewhere and gone after the other guy, the big guy with the actual drugs. The cops let him get away -- I mean, I’ll find him again, believe me --”

“Hey,” she breaks in. Her sneakers squeak on the tar. “Chill, OK?”

“I just can’t believe it. ‘What you need?’ right out in the open, taking the money on my corner --”

“Stop,” Del Toro says. Her hand is at his wrist. “You scared him. Scared the cops too. Over a dirty thirty of crack. It was nice of them not to let you have it with the SIG.” She doesn’t really sound like she’s joking.

“They know me,” Matt says. “They know what I do. That patrol sergeant and I go way back -- I can almost think of his name. Kretch, Kravitch, that might be it --”

“Power Man wants to kick your ass, you know,” Del Toro says.

In the apartment below them, someone is playing playing a video game with the volume all the way up. It’s one of those ones where you have to dance along or play guitar to music or something, not shoot. Matt can feel the vibrations in the glass plane of the skylight but the music blends with the sound of an ambulance on Madison Avenue headed for Mt. Sinai a few blocks away.

“He always seems to,” says Matt. “What do you know about it, anyway?”

“I’m part of the club now, remember?” Matt can’t really interpret her tone, proud and angry at once, and embarrassed for spying on him, maybe.

“So they put you on babysitting duty. Suicide watch.”

“That’s not it,” Del Toro says. “We’re --”

“Thanks for your concern, but no thanks.”

“I saw you with that kid, OK? You need to watch yourself.”

“You think I’m out of control? If you were keeping such a close eye on me, why didn’t you stop me?”

She doesn’t answer. She has her reasons, Matt thinks. Del Toro has been police -- before she was FBI, before she was the White Tiger. Matt used to think he wanted to be a police officer, too. Maybe, he had imagined at age ten, it would be far enough up from boxer that his father wouldn’t mind.

He’s got it, now. “If it was Cranston’s fear drug he was selling, that would make me beating him up acceptable to you?”

Del Toro’s voice is plain pissed off. “That would make sense at least! You’re going to kill somebody!”

Matt is an adult -- a defense attorney, a cynic, and a longtime observer of the NYPD. Cops aren’t really so far from a boxers. There is supposed to be a science to what they do, but it isn’t easy for the casual spectator to perceive. They operate mostly on instinct. They keep jabbing at a problem until they can get in a punch. Jack Murdock probably realized all of this.

Whatever Daredevil is isn’t as different as Matt used to think it was. He takes off his mask, carefully turning his face from her. His hair feels damp. “Selling drugs is against the law. A crime is a crime.”

“Dressing up in a costume and assaulting people is a crime.”

He ignores the obvious irony of this statement. “I would never kill anyone,” he tells her.

“People do it sometimes,” Del Toro says, her heart beating faster, “even when they don’t mean to.”

There’s a breeze on the roof. Matt walks to the edge with his eyes closed and presses against it, waist high. He thinks of the man on the subway platform, the man he didn’t know. That’s one way to go. What’s five seconds of pain?

He swings his legs over the parapet and lets himself drop. “Just tell Luke to leave me alone.”

He’ll try to be more careful.

FIN


End file.
